The Reflection of XIX Century Olfactory Culture in the Works of F.M. Dostoevsky. The Smell of the City on the Example of the Novel Crime and Punishment

The article is dedicated to the study of the smells of the city in thenovel Crime and Punishment. The sense of smell, as well as vision or hearing, cantransmit a significant amount of information. Being both a biological process anda cultural-historical phenomenon, smells reflect not only the immediate olfactorysensations and everyday reality, but also cause a number of cultural associations andemotional images. The historical meanings of smells that are specific to a particularculture are fixed in the public consciousness as evaluative categories for defining thewidest range of concepts: “good – bad”, “useful – harmful”, “your own – stranger”,and so on. This property allows odors to be an important element of social relationsand perform communicative functions. The communicative properties of smells areused in fiction for historical and geographical identification of the place of events, forcharacterization of characters, for creating the necessary atmosphere, for expressingthe author’s position on a particular issue. To study the functions of smell in the worksof F.M. Dostoevsky, the process of medicalization that took place in Russian urbanculture in the second half of the XIX century is of no small importance. Popularizationof scientific discoveries and dissemination of medical recommendations determineda number of important criteria for assessing the quality of life and formed the sanitaryand hygienic standards for everyday life. The formation of household standards hasled to a change in the social meaning of smells. This is reflected in the works of bothF.M. Dostoevsky and his contemporaries. The article traces how everyday smellsinherent in a particular social environment are extrapolated from the physical to thespiritual level.